Memoirs of a Hypnotist: 100 Days
book launch
04.10.2015, 7pm
LOCATION
Type Books
883 Queen Street West
Toronto
When Marcos Lutyens arrived in Kassel from Los Angeles in the summer of 2012, he didn’t know he would do 340 hypnotic sessions with the audience of dOCUMENTA (13) in the upcoming 100 days. Nor did he know that he would write a book about it: Memoirs of a Hypnotist: 100 Days, an intimate and hardly qualifiable document. Unfolding in the Reflection Room in Kassel’s Karlsauepark, it was the most involved instalment of the Hypnotic Show to date: “an exhibition that exists only in the mind of the audience,” according to Lutyens’ collaborater Raimundas MalaĊĦauskas. The artist’s narrative chronicles 100 days of the Hypnotic Show and puts together all kinds of improbably experiences for his readers: research of cognition and neurological activity, exploration of varying states of consciousness, and, at the centre, the possibility of contingency and embodied dematerialization within the current thinking of art.
Marcos Lutyens is an intermedia artist who has exhibited internationally, including at dOCUMENTA 13, the Tate Modern, LACMA, the Pompidou Centre, the Royal Academy and other museums and institutions internationally. He has worked with various tools and approaches to explore the processes of the mind. Lutyens engaged in experiments with Dr. V. S. Ramachandran, Director of the Center for Brain and Cognition, at the University of California, San Diego to explore the brain’s neural pathways in the synesthetic mind. His work with the mind, has lead him to develop events and exhibits that reflect research with specific social or ethnic groups such as the Muxhe, from the Zapotec culture in Southern Mexico. Building on his investigations into consciousness and social dynamics, Lutyens has worked on large-scale projects that involve the broader surroundings. Works include data tracking or feedback from pedestrian interactions, pollution and air quality levels, brain wave monitoring, animal communication and other dynamics that are generally invisible to the casual observer, and yet as important to us as the subjective processes of the inner mind.
Memoirs of a Hypnotist: 100 Days is co-published by CAC Vilnius, Kunstverein Toronto and Sternberg Press.